Re: Direct i/o changes break all non-GPL file systems

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Wed, 8 Feb 2012 00:07:15 +0000
Anton Altaparmakov <anton@tuxera.com> wrote:

> Hi Linus, Andrew, Christoph,
> 
> With kernel 3.1, Christoph removed i_alloc_sem and replaced it with calls (namely inode_dio_wait() and inode_dio_done()) which are EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() thus they cannot be used by non-GPL file systems and further inode_dio_wait() was pushed from notify_change() into the file system ->setattr() method but no non-GPL file system can make this call.

I'm advised by my lawyer that when this occurs that I should always
inform the other party the following

"For a Linux kernel containing any code I own the code is under the GNU
public license v2 (in some cases or later), I have never given permission
for that code to be used as part of a combined or derivative work which
contains binary chunks. I have never said that modules are somehow
magically outside the GPL and I am doubtful that in most cases a work
containing binary modules for a Linux kernel is compatible with the
licensing, although I accept there may be some cases that it is."



So unless your code is remarkably non-derivative I don't see that
anything has changed.